Port of L.A. ‘catching up’ after CrowdStrike outage cripples operations

The global computer glitch caused by a faulty software update crippled operations at the Port of L.A. on Friday.

Port director Gene Seroka told KNX News’ Craig Fiegener the issues began at 3:30 a.m.

“[The port berths] went to a manual operation as through their business continuity process and kept the cargo moving at early morning hours system came back up,” he said. “They reported that they processed all the trucks in Q again.”

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Despite this, Seroka said, they’re still not back to normal.

“I just went past TaPac’s facility…and looking inside the terminal, it was busier than I can recall it in a number of years since the big surge during COVID at the port of L.A.,” he said.

Meanwhile, trucks waited hours for cargo. One employee described it as a “catch-up” day, adding that Friday is their ship night.

“We probably have 100 cans sitting in our yard waiting to get delivered or more and, plus everything we got to pick up today,” he said. “Oh, man, this back up is pretty bad. Hopefully, they get it together and we start moving a little bit more smoothly.”

The glitch occurred due to an update by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. CEO George Kurtz wrote on X that it was not a security or cyber incident.

The catastrophic tech event has impacted everything from airline travel to hotel reservation systems. In an exclusive interview with KNX News , Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg talked about what the aftermath of this failure will look like.

“We need to engage private actors, local actors and state actors, to make sure that whatever they control is secure and robust,” he said. “And I think there are going to be a lot of conversations in the days to come about resiliency and redundancy as people rightly ask, how can one glitch in one software system create this many cascading impacts around the world?”

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